Politics hinders school reform in NSW

When the NSW government announced the Local Schools Local Decisions policy in March, it flagged an overhaul of public schools funding.

The details of the new funding system, called the resource allocation model (RAM), were released this week.

The similarity to the funding model proposed in the Gonski report in December is obvious. The head of the NSW Education Department, Michele Bruniges, has described the reforms as “Gonski-plus”.

The RAM and the Gonski model both recommend giving principals more autonomy over their school budgets, capitalising on the superior ability of school staff and communities to respond effectively to the needs of their students.

The RAM will devolve 70 per cent of public education funding to schools. Both recommend reducing the amount of specific program funding and line accountability, freeing up resources.

Each school’s budget would comprise a base allocation that reflects the basic costs of school operations, with additional funding that reflects the educational needs of the particular mix of students at the school. The latter is described as “equity loading”.

The RAM and the Gonski model include the same equity factors – socioeconomic status, indigenous, English language proficiency, and disability. Foremost among the differences is the application of the models. The RAM is limited to NSW public schools, and non-government schools are not mentioned.

The Gonski model is designed to integrate federal and state funding to all schools across the country.

Other differences between the models pertain mostly to the calculation of the base school allocation. A key feature of the Gonski model is that all funding is directly related to individual students.

The Gonski model’s base school allocation is a multiple of the number of children at the school. The RAM’s allocation is a function of the number of teachers at the school, and is only indirectly related to student numbers.

Both include “site loadings” that vary according to a school’s location and its physical size and age.

Perhaps most important, the RAM and the Gonski model derive their school funding standards from fundamentally different perspectives. At the heart of the Gonski model is a national resource standard – the estimated cost of achieving a nominated output (initially, literacy and numeracy performance).

In terms of efficiency, given that the largest cost and the greatest resource of schools is teachers, reform of school staffing offers the largest gains.

Yet despite the commotion surrounding the staffing aspect of the NSW policy, the mooted changes are relatively minor. For example, under the policy schools will be able to fill “at least every second vacancy once incentive transfer and Aboriginal employment applicants have been placed”. Pay attention to the last part of that sentence.

It reinforces the NSW government’s commitment to retain the statewide teacher transfer system, which appoints the majority of classroom teachers.

Unless the transfer system is scaled back significantly, the NSW government aspires only to allowing schools to fill half of a minority of teacher positions. Furthermore, schools now receiving equity program funding already have some flexibility in the use of these funds, so very little changes in practice.

An additional impediment to efficiency is the NSW government’s apparently open-ended promise about teacher salaries. Part of every school’s funding will be “quarantined” to pay teacher salaries but this is just the minimum. Any excess salary costs associated with the appointment of higher paid (that is, more senior) teachers will be covered by the state.

It’s reasonable to assume that the teacher-centric funding model and the maintenance of the transfer system are political, union-appeasing strategies.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be working.

No doubt the experience of Michele Bruniges with self-managing schools in the ACT has been instrumental in the NSW reforms, which are long overdue, if still imperfect. The RAM owes a small debt to the Gonski model but is indelibly stamped with NSW politics.

Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.